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Progressive Breakfast
MORNING MESSAGE: Business Roundtable Attacks The Elderly OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "Rich CEOs have used every tax loophole in the book to add to their own wealth, have been bailed out directly or indirectly by the American taxpayer, and have rigged corporate...
How Extreme Is the Business Roundtable? Check Out Its Attack On the Elderly.
Here's a thought experiment: What if a group of Social Security and Medicare recipients wanted to increase their benefits by, say, 1,000 percent, and proposed seizing rich people's assets – houses, cars, boats, whatever – to pay for it? And whenever anybody suggested...
Sequester And Shutdown Could Be More Likely Than A Fight Over The Debt Ceiling
Over at The Plum Line, Greg Sargent has an important post about the way the debt ceiling fight could end without triggering a cash-crunch crisis for the federal government. Greg thinks is could be one of two possibilities. First, the House GOP could agree to a version of the plan first proposed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that helped solve the last debt ceiling fight in August 2011.
Second, Greg says that the same combination of Democrats and some Republicans in the House that voted for the fiscal cliff deal would likely approve the McConnell plan or a clean debt ceiling increase if the GOP leadership allowed the vote to take place.
Both options are plausible for a basic reason Greg does not mention: The GOP seems to be coming to the conclusion that fighting over the debt ceiling is not its best option.
God, Guns, Gays and Conservatism's Slow Grift
Today, President Obama signed a broad array of executive orders to curb gun violence, in what was the boldest Presidential action against gun violence since the Clinton administration. In a speech that recalled the shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Col., and...
We Need Jobs And Need Infrastructure Fixed. Connect The Dots -- And Fix The Filibuster
Our country has so many urgent needs and two of them are the need for jobs for millions of unemployed people, and the need to upgrade our aging, crumbling infrastructure. Our current policy -- enforced by GOP filibusters of bills to fix the country's infrastructure -- of not fixing our infrastructure to "save money" is starting to cost way more than it saves, and this can only get worse. Hey, I have an idea, why don't we hire unemployed people to fix up our needs-fixing infrastructure, and help get our economy moving again.
Progressive Breakfast
MORNING MESSAGE: Declare Victory Over The Deficit OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "When it comes to spending cuts, it’s time to follow the advice a general offered when we were mired in Vietnam: Declare victory and get out ... Washington needs to spend more money now...
Progressive Breakfast
MORNING MESSAGE: Declare Victory Over The Deficit OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "When it comes to spending cuts, it’s time to follow the advice a general offered when we were mired in Vietnam: Declare victory and get out ... Washington needs to spend more money now...
Progressive Breakfast
MORNING MESSAGE: Declare Victory Over The Deficit OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "When it comes to spending cuts, it’s time to follow the advice a general offered when we were mired in Vietnam: Declare victory and get out ... Washington needs to spend more money now...
Time to Declare Victory Over the Deficit – And Start Fixing Our Real Problems
That deficit problem we keep hearing about is gone. When it comes to spending cuts, it's time to follow the advice a general offered when we were mired in Vietnam: Declare victory and get out. We had a deficit problem, once, although it was never as urgent or as...
Here's Why Republican Talk About Default And Shutdown Is Not An Empty Threat
Politico had an outstanding but truly bone-chilling story yesterday about how appealing the prospects of a default and a government shutdown may be to House Republicans.
According to the piece by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Jake Sherman, forcing a default by not raising the debt ceiling and shutting down the government by not passing a continuing resolution may be the preferred ways to go by a majority of the House GOP caucus no matter what that would mean to the U.S. economy, the Republican Party's overall approval rating, the GOP's prospects for a Senate majority in 2014 or a Republican winning the White House in 2016.
To those of us who have watched Washington operate for a while, this obviously sounds like totally insane, crazy self-destructive behavior by the House GOP.
